Thanks everyone for your answers! Following your suggestions I've been able to reduce my memory usage to 195M SWAP and 108M RSS, without touching my code (I'll definitely optimize it soon, but this was supposed to be a solution to get me out of trouble fast).

Here's the list of things I did:

Got rid of the wildcard used in VirtualHost entries. Instead of *:80 and *:443, I used the real IP of my server.

These are by no means magical numbers. I've spent some time trying different values and combination, and then testing them against the real usage of my server and everyone should do the same in their enviroment. For the record, my server receives close to 2M pvs/month, serving both dynamic pages and assets at a regular rate - no digg effect. The intention, again, was to reduce the memory footprint, not to improve performance or HA.

Tunned down Apache's KeepAlive. By setting KeepAliveTimeout to a lower value (2 in my case) I can expect less server processes just waiting on connections with idle clients that may not request any more content.

destinyland writes"Stephen Wolfram, the physicist behind the Wolfram Alpha 'answer engine,' believes that Google would beat Bing in any contest based on questions from Jeopardy. 'Wolfram took a sample of Jeopardy clues and fed them into search engines,' explains one technology blog. 'When it came to the first page, Google got 69 percent correct, just beating Ask with 68 percent and Bing on 63 percent. ... To put that into context, the average human contestant gets 60 percent of answers correct, while champion Ken Jennings has a record of 79 percent.' Interestingly, Wikipedia came in last, scoring 23%, though they may have more to do with how Wikipedia handles searches. In two weeks, IBM's Watson computer will compete on Jeopardy against two of the show's all-time human champions."

As some of you may know, I spent some time doing some significant development with the Play Framework. I have to say that I think the Play Framework has surpassed my experiences with Spring and Spring Roo. That’s not to say that Spring and similar aren't decent frameworks, but I have been particularly impressed with the feedback loop provided by Play. It has, without a doubt, the most direct code-test-cycle I have seen in any platform for Java (it approaches the instant feedback of Rails), and also has the distinct advantage of being stateless out-of-the-box (something Spring and Wicket are definitely lacking). Beyond this I fnd the distinct lack of XML declarations a refreshing change. If you have ever had to configure Hibernate and the like in a Spring application you will know what I mean.

Play manages this feedback loop problem in a rather novel way – embedded in the framework is the Eclipse compiler for Java (ECJ). This means that when you’re coding for the play framework, you’re not sending it your class files, but rather your source files. This allows Play to recompile code in a running instance on the fly – I literally only restarted my application a handful of times while I was coding over the course of several days. It also integrates seamlessly with IDEs, and ships with an embedded HTTP runtime (no deployment is necessary during development).

There are a number of other benefits Play can provide by working with source files instead of class files. Much like Rails ability to add functionality to your application at runtime, Play can (and does) pre-process certain Java classes to add functionality.

Play is now fully supports Scala, which would allow for other modern language features to be used with this highly interactive framework.

It’s hard to describe all of the neat features Play provides in a few hundred words, but I would highly recommend you check it out – they have a 10 minute screencast they sells it better than I can. While I’m still convinced Java (as a language) will be surpassed for an overwhelming majority of the web-development as the language continues to stagnate, this is a compelling framework for the Java platform as a whole, even if Java isn’t your language of choice.

Tuesday, January 25, 2011

UbuntGeek are offering a free PDF download of Bash Sheel Scripting Guide for Beginners if anyone is interested. Everybody working on a UNIX or UNIX-like system who wants to make life easier on themselves, power users and sysadmins alike, can benefit from reading this book.

Switch Establishes New Standard for Ultra-Scale Data Center Campus Ecosystems with SuperNAP-West Expansion to 2,000,000+ Squa...Switch today announced the expansion of its Western United States data center campus, SuperNAP-West, to 2 million+ square feet of data center space. At 407,000 square feet, SuperNAP-7 (NV), located in Las Vegas, is the world's highest density, ultra-scale data center...

Cant wait to see what they come up with next! Thats a lot of cloud space!

Friday, January 21, 2011

Joshua Johnson from Design Shack has compiled a nice list of elegant web application designs. These are the kinds of sites all web developers dream of achieving but rarely come close. An interesting read so check it out!

Was researching the net today for EC2 managment utilities and stumbled on this blog post on Crunch Tools. Mentioned Overmind, a very promising web application to manage all my cloud instances from a centralised point. According to their GitHub page, Overmind aims to provider a complete server provisioning and configuration management application.

The first version is a unified front-end to public and private clouds, custom server providers and dedicated hardware. Its based on Python, Django Web Framework and libcloud.

Eucalyptus 2.0 has been released. This latest version of the Eucalyptus open source cloud introduces several new features, including iSCSI support for EBS volumes, S3 versioning, virtio support for KVM hypervisors, and new administrator tools.

When the Google Wave project was killed by Google, and subsequently proposed in the Apache Software Foundation incubator, there was an “overwhelmingly positive” seal of approval from the ASF members. It’s great to see so many of the original devs assigned to the project volunteering to continue their work through the open sourced version. I look forward to seeing how the ASF community molds and shapes this project into something awesome.

About This Blog

About Me

I am an IT Engineer with more than 15 years experience in the field. I have worked for large multinational companies including a few Fortune 100 at System Admin level up to CIO in recent times. Currently developing a Play! Web Application based SCADA app for the mining sector.